Rewrite Devlog #12

Welcome to this year's last devlog about the upcoming rewritten version of Alien Horizon, currently planned to be released in April (no guarantees). As promised last time, today I'm going to show you some of the changes to education, services and shopping.

Education

As you can see, thanks to customization of work shifts, you can set multiple studying shifts in regular schools, even night shifts. Keep in mind, however, that children have significantly worse studying results when doing so when it's dark outside and that it's impossible to have more than one shift that guarantees sunlight during the whole shift. So, those afternoon and night shift students are going to be handicapped.

The bigger changes are to higher education, though. In preview alpha, colonists chose the skill (expertise) they were going to study by a weighted dice roll, with each skill having a different manually set weight that couldn't be modified by anything other than modding the game. In the rewrite, the system is way more dynamic:

Whenever colonists meet, they can become acquaintances or even friends. This happens in the background and I'd like this system to have an effect on group dynamics among colonists (although that's mostly going to be after the initial version of the rewrite). What matters for education is that children who meet adults (including their parents) have a chance of getting a passion for the profession the adult colonist does as a job - this simulates children learning about those jobs and potentially deciding that they want to pursue a career in it.

Children can acquire up to three passions before they become adults, and when choosing a skill to study, they pick one that corresponds to one of the passions. Which one they pick also depends on how desirable the skill currently is in the colony, which is calculated as the ratio between colonists with the skill and number of jobs that require it. If a skill is especially desirable (there aren't enough people to fill all the jobs), they may even pick to study it without a corresponding passion.

This system ensures that colonists naturally converge to the skills that are currently needed in the colony and in cases when the need is especially dire, fill it even more quickly. The passions stay with the colonist for the rest of their life and if they manage to get a job they have a passion for, they get a 10% productivity boost.

Services

Services have gotten an update too. Going from top to bottom, you can see that services have an age restriction. This was already the case in preview alpha, although it wasn't visible anywhere. Age restrictions ensure children don't frequent bars and babies don't push weights at a fitness center.

Some services require a resource to operate, liquor in the case of bars (can be produced relatively early at the food processing plant). Every time a colonist visits the service, the resource is consumed and once it runs out, the service can't function anymore, so you have to make sure you produce enough. The bar is currently the only service that has this requirement, but in the future, there are going to be more, like swimming pool (water) or café (coffee).

Aside from capacity, all services now also have a queue of colonists that can wait their turn if the service is full. This ensures that a service's capacity can be used to the max. Colonists also take queue length into account when deciding which services to visit in order to spread out more.

The service's capacity is no longer dependent on the building's efficiency. Instead, efficiency determines quality of the visit. If quality is high, visiting colonists have a pleasant experience and can get more of their needs fulfilled, while the opposite is true as well. Capacity isn't set in stone, however - you can sacrifice some of it to get better quality and vice versa using a slider.

Next up in the UI are the needs the service can fulfill. The bar is where friendships can easily form. What isn't visible is that workplace focus (discussed in devlog #8) of the workers that work at the bar can also affect how well the needs are serviced. In the case of the bar, setting extra focus on teamwork can provide extra friendship and setting it to playfulness increases recreation.

At the bottom is a graph of the service usage over the last 24 hours, which is much more detailed than the stats in preview alpha and should give you a good idea of how frequented the service is at times. Colonists also take this stat into account when deciding where to visit.

Consumer goods and shopping

In preview alpha, colonists picked up consumer goods and food for home cooking from warehouses by default and you had to set a law to make them shop at stores. Since shopping in warehouses was only a starting option and was never needed after, it was removed in the rewrite and colonists always shop at stores. The ship's habitation module acts as a small store to get things going.

Stores now also have a service quality stat like services, but in this case, it determines how fast customers can shop. Aside from that, you can now customize what goods the store carries to a precise degree. Each store has a shelf space capacity and each resource takes up some of the space. You can carry one resource multiple times to increase shopping speed for this resource or leave some shelf space empty for a small visitor capacity bonus.

Just like in the case of workplace focus, I'd like to later introduce ways to automate such configuration and tie it to politics in order to ease up micromanagement.

Colonists can no longer just take goods for free - they have to use their rations to do so. The player can determine how many rations colonists get of each good every season (except food, which is one type of ration for all types of food). Each good has several levels of comfort the colonists can achieve, which affects their well being. The level their home is at depends on how much of the good they currently have, but the higher the level, the higher the consumption. What level of comfort colonists aim for depends on how many rations they are getting. The ration system will also make later implementation of currencies easier.

That's all for this year, but you can look forward to another devlog at the end of January. You can also hop on the official Discord server to see extra teasers. I hope you've enjoyed this devlog and I wish you merry Christmas, happy New Year and any other holidays you may celebrate this time of year!